Stenzek (DuckStation developer, also contributed many dramatic improvements to Dolphin and PCSX2) effectively declared very public war on Retroarch. He gets a lot of shit for it in certain circles, and for the way he did it (relicensing DuckStation from GPL to a nonfree license). Lots of drama.

It wouldn't be an serious emulator without tons of drama. It's pretty much a requirement.

The relicense had nothing to do with that and it wouldn't stop RetroArch regardless. They ship RA with several by-license-text incompatible[0] emulators anyway; many of their cores are under non-commercial licenses and some are explicitly included against the wishes of their original developers; ask the MAME devs what they think of RetroArch.

Stenzek changed the license because he had a meltdown last month when PCSX2 changed it's license from the LGPL to the GPL (which is allowed by the LGPL; there's nothing dubious about making this change)[1] for... some reason. In response, he threw a tantrum and closed all his open PCSX2 PRs, effectively quitting the project[2][3][4].

RetroArch is a plague on the emulation community, but that's not why Stenzek relicensed his emulator.

[0]: If this is actually incompatible will largely depend on your views how the GPL interacts with dynamic linking. Don't just repeat the FSF FAQ, look for other legal opinions not written by free software advocates.

[1]: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/11648

[2]: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/11315

[3]: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/11401

[4]: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/11449

Did Stenzek publicly discuss his motivations somewhere, or did this happen in some unindexed chatroom/backroom? It would probably be good to look over the rational and complaints causing the fallout first hand.

> Stenzek changed the license because he had a meltdown last month when PCSX2 changed it's license from the LGPL to the GPL (which is allowed by the LGPL; there's nothing dubious about making this change)[1] for... some reason. In response, he threw a tantrum and closed all his open PCSX2 PRs, effectively quitting the project[2][3][4].

Pretty sure it's because he would be "forced" to open-source Aethersx2 (which is an android port of pcsx2).

He wouldn't be. AetherSX2 is based on LGPL-era PCSX2 code and license changes don't apply retroactively like that (otherwise, imagine if SDL changed its license to GPL and instantly forced half of PC games to go open source).

It would only prevent him from using code added after the switch to GPL, which is not a problem because AetherSX2 ended development long before PCSX2 switched to the GPL.